SHAMAN
Volume 31 Numbers 1 & 2 Spring/Autumn 2023
Articles
ANTONIO J. GUERREIRO:
The Wehèa’s Shamanic Healing and Rites: An Anxiety-Reducing Mechanism?
The practice of shamanic healing correlates social and psychological aspects. This central feature was remarked on by Claude Lévi-Strauss in regard to Amerindian shamanic healing practices and magic, pointing to its symbolical effectiveness (1958 [1949]). This is also the case in the Austronesian culture area of Insular Southeast Asia, especially in Borneo. Several studies have observed the complexity and variations in shamanic ritual healing, and on its soothing dimension in social life. In doing this, shamanic practice integrates a set of animistic representations embedded in oral literature, myths and songs. Among the Wehèa people of East Kutai, Kalimantan, Indonesia, enjuk shamanic rites are divided into four categories, encompassing therapy and ritual purification according to social and ritual contexts in village society. In this article, I outline the structure of enjuk shamanic séance in relation to cosmological background and related beliefs. I argue that the enjuk ritual complex operates significantly as an anxiety-reducing mechanism, at individual, household and community levels. It belongs clearly to a hierarchical mode of shamanism (Stépanoff 2022). In order to achieve this, Wehèa shamans use a peculiar form of speech in song form (wa’ juk) besides gestures and dialogues that appeal to the audience. They treat “abnormal (hot) situations” developing among their fellow villagers in order to restore a “beneficial (cool) state” according to the custom (edat), thereby avoiding the looming dangers of transgression induced by evil spirits. Enjuk rites are tightly integrated into the social fabric. The practice of shamanism is connected to status by an initiation process, i.e. for people who have reached middle age. The article describes how the Wehèa’s shamans, both women and men, achieve ritual effectiveness.
MONICA JANOWSKI:
The Great Spirit and Facebook in the Kelabit Highlands, Borneo
I want here to discuss an ancient belief as it has recently been expressed through a modern medium: Facebook. The people of the Kelabit Highlands, originally animistic, became Christian after the Second World War, adopting an evangelical and charismatic form of Christianity and apparently abandoning any interest or concern in the spirits of nature that had previously played a central role in their lives. However, the Facebook conversation that I will discuss here, which took place in 2013, seems to express an interest in reviving the relationship that young men had in earlier times with the Great Spirit, Ada’ Rayeh, through an entity described as Pun Tumid, literally ‟Grandfather Heel.” I believe that this reflects a deep-rooted desire to rekindle a spiritual relationship with and sense of belonging to the forest and nature as a whole, contra the demonization of the spirits of the forest that has accompanied the form of Christianity adopted by the Kelabit.
Francis Joy and Peter Armstrand:
The Beliefs and Practices of Peter Armstrand, Sámi Drum Maker and Healer and the Expressions of Sámi Religion in a Contemporary Setting
In the midst of a revival of Sámi shamanism, the work of different practitioners is slowly becoming more visible throughout northern Fennoscandia, which is where engagement with the work of Peter Armstrand is encountered within a ritual landscape setting deep in Sápmi, the Sámi homeland area in northern Sweden. Armstrand’s beliefs and practices are what characterize his work as a healer and ritual–ceremonial specialist and drum maker, which are all abilities that have been well-known much earlier among noaidi the religious specialist in Sámi culture from the seventeenth century when Sámi pre-Christian religion underwent harsh and forceful changes due to missionizing and conversion of the Sámi people to Christianity. This new research presents a number of cultural expressions in relation to the making of Sámi religion in a contemporary context which is encountered through the practices of offering, healing, ritual landscapes, drum making and decoration.
Michael Knüppel:
The Election of the “Heavenly King” Hóng Xiùquán from a Shamanic Perspective
In this article, the author deals with the question of how to assess the “crisis” of the founder of the Tàipíng movement (Tàipíng Tiānguó 太平天囯), Hóng Xiùquán (洪秀全), which was accompanied by visions and a calling (being “chosen”), against the background of the “shaman’s disease” and the calling to become a shaman. As was already generally known from the start of the study of the movement and the reporting on it and the Tàipíng rebellion, and as documented in the literature on the subject that already existed in the 1850s, Hóng’s “crisis” played a significant role in the election of the “Heavenly King.” This “crisis,” which was characterized by fever attacks and visions, was triggered by Hóng’s repeated failures in the examinations for civil-service training in the “Middle Kingdom” in 1837. Hóng told some confidants about the vision, but did not pay any further attention to it afterwards. After he had failed the test for the fifth and last time in 1843, he began to interpret the visions he had had years before as a kind of “revival experience.” Although the calling/election was here transferred into a partly Christian context, the substrate of shamanism as we find it in South China confronts us with some questions, although such interpretations are to be regarded with considerable caution, as Hong’s example shows us.
Carla Corradi Musi
Finno-Ugric and Siberian Shamanism: A Cultural Model for Today’s Industrialized Societies
The survival of the values of Siberian shamanism, featured in Finno-Ugric cultures, shows that this system of thought constitutes a deep philosophy of life, functional in every age to this day. This type of shamanism maximizes the importance of the relationships between the various beings of the cosmos, each conceived as an individual belonging to a specific species, in the same vein as men. Since every “person” is potentially ambivalent, the fight against evil is fundamental to the affirmation of good. Not surprisingly, the shaman is a master of conflict, who knows how to overcome the struggling forces which threaten mutual respect between the different “people” of the cosmos. In particular, he knows the laws of nature, its capacity for renovatio and its destructive force, and he is concerned with safeguarding it in his community. He reminds everyone that the resources of nature are living cultural assets. This conception draws from ancestral myths that attribute a sentient soul to every element of the world, regardless of their species, which is often guarded by authoritative figures such as the Master of the Animals. The current mentality of industrialized societies, which has economic progress at its heart, calls for a change informed by ancient cultural wisdom: Siberian shamanism, which has been forgotten or misunderstood, constitutes a precious model for sustainability.
Victoria S. Peemot:
What Do Images on Drumheads Tell? Stories of Two Khakas Drums Brought to Finland in 1917
Descriptions of ethnographic objects in the museum and private collections often offer scarce information about their origin and the meanings the craftsmen ascribed to materials and drawings. This article aims to establish provenance of two drums, using the shapes of the drumheads and handles, and visual elements, as analytical tools. Two drums, which form the focus of this paper, were brought back in 1917 by the Finnish geologist Jacob J. Sederholm from an expedition to Uriankhai (currently, the Tyva Republic in the Russian Federation). Because of lacking information, I approached the drums themselves—the shapes of their drumheads and handles, their size, images, and decoration—as analytical tools. As a result of this study, I suggest that these two drums could be affiliated with either Kacha or Sagai people, the subethnic groups that contributed to the current day Khakas ethnicity.
Jonas Wellendorf:
From Odinus to Noidus: Cultures in Contact in the Thirteenth and Eighteenth Centuries
It has been argued that Isaac Olsen’s early eighteenth-century account of the first noaidi and the origin of the noaidevuohta, or the craft of the noaidi, channels Sami traditions about the first shaman. This paper shows how Olsen relied on the Old Norse Heimskringla, available to him in the translation of Peder Claussøn Friis, to construct a theory about diffusion and derivation whereby Odin, whom Heimskringla describes as the preeminent god and culture-bringer of the Scandinavians, also is the one who brought the noaidevuohta to the Sami.
Obituaries
Hu Tai-li (Liu Pi-chen)
Book Reviews
Toni Huber. Source of Life: Revitalisation Rites and Bon Shamans in Bhutan and the Eastern Himalayas (Davide Torri)
Nastassja Martin. Les âmes sauvages: Face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska and À l’est des rêves: Réponses even aux crises systématiques (Tim Hodgkinson)
John C. Ryan, patricia vieira and monica gagliano (eds) The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (Davide Torri)
Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello and Karen Polinger Foster (eds) The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World (Davide Torri)
Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Andy Reymann. Löwenmenschen und Schamanen: Magie in der Vorgeschichte (Michael Knüppel)
News and Notes
Report on the Conference of the International Society for Academic Research on Shamanism, 25–28 August 2022, Borneo Culture Museum, Sarawak Museum Department, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (Diana Riboli)
ISARS Conference 2024, Sapienza University of Rome